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Overview of the issue

I went to install Elasticsearch on a newly built Fedora 28 VM. For my first attempt, I tried to use the built-in repo as follows

sudo yum update
sudo yum install elasticsearch

However, when I started Elasticsearch, it failed to launch with the following error.

Could not find netty3-3.9.3 Java extension for this JVM

My first effort at resolution involved searching on-line for a solution. Some solutions recommend fixing Open JVM. However, it seemed to me to be a more straight-forward solution to just install the Oracle JVM. So, I removed Open JVM and installed Oracle JVM instead. This resolved the issue and Elasticsearch started normally.

I wanted to calculate the duration of a video in seconds as in integer variable. For this I needed software outside of PHP. So, I decided to use the open source video encoding library, avconv, running on Linux Mint / Ubuntu.

If you pass a video to avconv, it returns meta-data about the video, including its duration, e.g.

The first mktime returned a timestamp relative to the current time, so we need to subtract the number of seconds from the current timestamp at midnight. This gives us the number of seconds in our video as an integer value.

During the week, I was faced with the problem of dividing a given string containing a file path into the file name, extension and the path to the file’s directory. For example, “/home/myuser/myfile.ext”, has to be split into “/home/myuser/”, “myfile” and “ext”.

My first instinct was to use PHP’s explode() function to split the string on the forward slash. This would give me my file name and extension in the last element of the returned array and each of the directories of my path in the preceding elements. Of course, I would then have to build my directory path from these elements before returning the result, re-inserting the forward slash along the way.

This did not strike me as an elegant way to proceed. So on further reflection, I started my solution using basename(). This returns the file name and extension for a given file path. From here, I used explode to split the base file name into it’s file name and extension. Note that I did not store the “.” between the file name and extension as the specification did not require this.

Now, I needed the directory path to the file. Of course, my input string already had this information. I just had to remove the file name and extension from the end. So, I used substr() to get the sub string from the start of the source path less the length of the base file name (with it’s extension).

This struck me as being a more succinct resolution which is more intuitive to understand. I have included some sample code below.

One of my colleagues needed to set up a server to run the software I was developing. To make his task easier, he suggested that I create a disk image from my development virtual machine.

The most important thing is the configuration would be taken from my Linux environment and so would be guaranteed to run with minimal setup required. As a bonus, he would also get the latest version of my code.

My colleague suggested using Remastersys. This is a tool which can image the Linux environment that it is running on.

Once installed, I attempted to make a backup of my entire virtual machine.

$sudo remastersys backup custom.iso

It was soon obvious that this was not the best approach. I had a lot of large files from previous work. The disk image failed to create as I ran out of space on my fixed size virtual disk. On failure, the image size was over 11GB, which was way too big for my purpose.

My first reaction was to remove most of the large files. This time the ISO file was created properly, but again it was large at over 3.4GB. My colleague was at a remote location, and I needed to share the image with him through DropBox. A quick check confirmed that my DropBox account was restricted to 2.5GB of data.

So, I needed a different approach. At this point, I realised that the image did not need most of the files in my home directory, which included a lot of test data as well as development tools. So, I could make a distribution image which excluded my home directory.

In order to accomplish this, I needed to move my project code out of its cloned repository in my home directory and move it to an accessible location for the distribution image. I had to update my Apache virtual hosting configuration and reload Apache. [Please see my last post , Installing Laravel on Linux Mint / Ubuntu/]

Once, this change was made and tested, I removed the Remastersys data related to creating the previous image.

$sudo remastersys clean

Now, I was ready to create my distribution image.

$sudo remastersys dist custom.iso

Once complete, the new ISO image was 2.4GB in size. While still large, it was manageable. I managed to upload the image to my DropBox account and share it with my colleague, who was able to set up his server with a single clean installation.

Finally, as the disk image was created, I reset my Apache virtual host to point to my cloned source code repository, so that I could continue my development as before.

Note the line “Require all granted”. This command has been updated from my earlier blog post and is required by Apache 2.4. One of my previous blog entries listed the following lines instead. These are now out of date.

Order allow,deny
Allow from all

Once mysite.conf was updated, I used the following commands to activate the new virtual host. I disabled the default site, enabled my virtual site and reloaded Apache.

To facilitate debugging some problems with encoding large video files using open source software running on Linux, I decided to run the encoding software on a virtual machine. Initially, I copied the data onto the Windows host from a memory stick.

The next step was to do the encoding. I needed to copy the source video to my VirtualBox virtual machine. My first thought was to use Virtual Box’s file sharing feature. To enable this, I had to install the VirtualBox Extensions. Then, I discovered that I would have to buy a licence, to use the Extensions beyond the trial period, as only VirtualBox itself is open source. To try it out, I opted to install the Extensions for the one month trial period. However, I got an error when trying to install the Extensions. A second attempt yielded the same result.

I did not have time to resolve the error, as I needed to look at problems found with video encoding. To get working on our debugging, I copied the video files to the virtual machine using a USB stick, which turned out to be very slow and laborious.

Then, I remembered from previous research that I had configured port forwarding on my virtual machine. This experiment involved loading web pages on the Windows host served by Apache on the virtual machine (VM). I did this through port forwarding. At the time, I had also configured port forwarding to allow ssh access to the VM.

A colleague pointed out that scp uses the same port as ssh (port 22). So, I should be able to use port forwarding to transfer files using scp from Windows to my VM. Please see the below screenshot.

At this point, all that I needed to do was configure WinSCP on Windows to transfer to the local host using the port 3022 which was mapped to port 22 on the VM. So, on the WinSCP Login page, I set up a session with as follows:

File protocol: sftp

Hostname: 127.0.0.1

Port number: 3022

This worked very well. It still took some time to transfer the large video files back and forth. The files were so large that it was better to delete them from the VM once they had been encoded and copied back to the host via scp, as the VM’s virtual hard disk was limited in size.

It would be a faster work flow to enable file sharing as the shared folder would be available on both the host and VM simultaneously. However, this was a useful solution given the fact that the VirtualBox Extensions would not install on my system. In addition, if only occasional file transfer is involved, then the VirtualBox Extensions may be avoided, thus avoiding the associated licensing costs.